Africa

Anxiety in Mozambique

Ransom notes

HALF an hour before noon on October 31st a few thousand people were still gathered in independence square in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, at the end of a four-hour protest march. Many of them sported white T-shirts with slogans blazed in red: “We demand security” read one; “stop abductions” was another.

This sort of rally is rare in Mozambique and this one was staged amid growing anxiety about the security situation in the country. Two days before the march, six men including three policemen were jailed for 16 years for their part in a spate of kidnappings in 2011 and 2012. The gang had demanded ransoms of as much as $165,000. On the same day it emerged that a 13-year-old boy had been murdered by kidnappers. A ransom had been raised. Then the police were alerted and the boy was killed immediately.

A series of small-scale clashes between government forces and a militia attached to Renamo, the main opposition party, have added to the general disquiet. Alarmingly on October 21st Renamo’s spokesman, Fernando Mazanga, declared an end to the peace deal struck in 1992 with Frelimo, the party that has ruled Mozambique ever since. The peace accord ended a brutal 16-year civil war which claimed 1m lives. So any echo of such awful times makes Mozambicans nervous.

A few blocks away from the protests in Independent Square at Renamo’s Maputo offices, Mr Mazanga (speaking through an interpreter) qualified his earlier statement. Renamo had not ditched the peace deal, he said. “It was Frelimo who were the ones putting aside the peace accord” when the government’s forces attacked Renamo’s headquarters in Satunjira, a few hundred kilometres north of Maputo. His earlier declaration that peace is over “was our way to denounce what they were doing”.

Few believe that Renamo has the military muscle to sustain a full-scale civil war in any case. Mozambique’s president, Armando Guebuza, told the AFP press agency that talks were the only way to resolve the crisis between his Frelimo party and Renamo. “I do not think, and that is a strong 'no'... that we are going back to war,” he said. Such talks might be tricky to arrange. Renamo’s leader, Afonso Dhlakama is in hiding. “The military has to pull back from Satunjira before we can talk,” says Mr Mazanga.

Renamo has steadily lost support since a narrow defeat in elections in 1999. But it still has 51 of the 250 seats in parliament. It is boycotting local elections due on November 20th because, it says, the electoral set-up is biased against it. Renamo’s leaders have long complained that its followers were not integrated into the police and security forces after the civil war ended in 1992.

For months its militia have staged sporadic attacks along a stretch of Mozambique’s main north-south highway. In June it threatened to disrupt the Sena railway that links the coal-mining region of Tete to the Indian Ocean port of Beira. If such a threat were carried out, it would strike at the heart of Mozambique’s economy and alarm foreign investors in its fledging coal and off-shore gas industries. Asked if such action was still an option, Mr Mazanga was evasive “Words cannot kill”, he said. “Our aim was to warn the international community that things are not going well in Mozambique.”

Readers' comments

Your report failed to convey the key message from the unprecedented peace marches held simultaneously in the capital and in major cities, and which continued today elsewhere in the country: President Guebuza must desist of his warmongering posture – not the opposition; a president who has attracted widespread criticism from all sectors of Mozambican society, including from within his own party, Frelimo.